Homeschool Wild Days went great.  All of the moms were happy that we had put it together and wanted to be informed of the next one.  I will post more about what the kids did later, when I figure out how to post pictures here.

Quoth the three-year-old, "Cat volcanoes blast pink cats!"  It came completely out of the blue.  We haven't touched geography materials in weeks.  He was very expressive about it, illustrating with his flying fingers the trajectory of the kitties.   That child has a unique mind.

The middle boys are starting to get excited about Hanukkah.  We printed out coloring pages, and Verdi has been copying letters off the dreidel.   I have already had several opportunities to practice my "Christmas is their party; Hanukkah and Shabbat and Purim and Rosh Hashana . . . are our parties."  I have also had several invitations to give up Hanukkah and join in the tree worship but I just can't bring myself to do it.  True, it would make more sense given our actual religion.  But even if we aren't Jewish, Hanukkah is what we have done since the oldest was a baby.  It's sentimental.  It's tradition. 

Bear listened to me read The Funny Little Woman the other night and has since been pretending to be an oni monster. That's a type of Japanese demon. 

Verdi has been very much into cars lately, talking at length about ways to design them.  Last night on the way back from the grocery store, he said, "Hey!  I know how you can make a car that's not so awful for the environment!"  (We often discuss, while trudging through rain or cold, the ethics behind our decision to walk almost everywhere.)   I asked how he would do that.  "We could trap the exhaust fumes in a container, then dump that container once in a while at a kind of reverse gas station."   I thought this was brilliant for a six-year-old.  We talked some about ways to contain fumes safely and other engineering issues. 

Sterling, meanwhile, contains to write his fan fiction.  Even though I have officially completely banned Pokemon for the younger kids, he has free reign.  I'm not sure exactly what he is doing, but according to my parent spyware, in the past week he has created and downloaded tons of sprites (little pokemon icons), registered with a message board hosting site, registered with a regular website hosting site, and spent hours typing up stories about Pokemon adventures.  He's being extremely creative and diligent -- nd secretive, or maybe just respectful of my distaste for the cartoon cockfighting.

The past two weeks have been taken up with family, travel and miscellany.   I've assigned the kids historical fiction and have been pleased to see that they are continuing to write, read, and do science and art for fun while I take this break.  On Monday, we have the first Homeschool Wild Day.   After that, school will resume normally.  I'm looking forward to it.

This past week I agreed to contact every congregation, church, synagogue, and mosque in my town to pass on a good offer our church got to help with the cost of switching to healthy and environmentally sound cleaning products for their sanctuary/space. 

Also this past week I published a Call for Submissions for the very first book I've ever attempted to edit.

Also this past week I started what I hope will become a new homeschool tradition in the central NY area: Homeschool Wild Days.  Read all about it here.

We are having a fantastic time with our studies too, really getting things like explorers and stuff that I had just given up on before.  Oh and that protozoa soup the kids looked at through their microscopes was truly disgusting -- yay for them!

Every fourth thing out of my three-year-olds mouth is, "Why did Wal-Mart come to town?"  It is driving me CrAzY!

We always got ooky feelings abandoning the hard-working, honest folks who devoted their lives to excellence in their shoppes and going instead to a store the size of small town, buying plastic stuff that seemed unnaturally inexpensive. But we did not boycott Wal-Mart until my little brother got a job there.  He became intimately aware of how every level of WalMart, from the big big corporate family to the little bitty Greeters at the door, must be unethical in order for WalMart to exist.  A little bit of research into how typical or widespread the practices at my brothers Walmart were, convinced me to never step foot on a WalMart parking lot again.  (Did you know WalMart parking lots are statistically more dangerous than any other corporation's lots, and that this is a direct result of WalMart's messed up security policy?  A policy determined in order to make them money . . . I can go on and on . . . )

Anyway, we went to see the WalMart movie when it came out, of course.  We also downloaded this song and occasionally would put it into rotation on the MP3 player.   The kids are pretty good about not repeating curse words so I didn't mind the inclusion of one.  But the three-year-old -- I don't know why! -- he LOVES the song.  He sings it over and over.  It's insane. 

Since the kids liked the song so much, I took the time to go through the lyrics with them and explain what it all refers to.   Since then, the three-year-old wants me to repeat the info ALL THE TIME.   I am going crazy . . . crazy . . .

For the past fifteen minutes, the baby has been following our six-year-old around with his arms out.   When his big brother lifts him up, the baby snuggles against him with the widest smile.    Six-year-old has to struggle to lift him but he holds him for as long as he can.

This week tried and affirmed my decision to homeschool.  I was diagnosed with TMJ on Friday, so I'm not supposed to move my jaw to speak or chew for several days.  Brett (dh) can't teach from my lesson plans because we are behind in some, ahead in some . . .

 . . . oh, now the six-year-old is crawling on all fours, and calling, "all aboard!"   Three-year-old has climbed on and is giggling . . .

On Wednesday I got a newsletter from a well-known curriculum supplier that mentioned someone's worries about homeschool fallibilities.   The woman was saying that she loves homeschooling, but she noticed homeschoolers often can't work independently and are not as good at writing as public schoolers.   She wanted suggestions for working on these flaws.  Instead of giving her suggestions, everyone jumped to the defense of homeschoolers.   I find it troublesome that we deny our flaws instead of trying to fix them!  I struggle with the kids poor writing skills and worry about their inability to stay independently focused in groups and was looking for help.

Then, in my mailbox, there was a homeschool catalog that advertises by playing on our fears of leaving something out.  Even if we don't leave something out, they say, being flexible about requirements for grades means that the kids won't learn to be responsible and accountable and study hard.  

On top of that, we went to a religious gathering this weekend where almost everyone worked as a teacher of some sort.  All of the children there, even the two-year-old, were in school.   I didn't mention that we homeschool.  I was excited that the leader of the group was bemoaning the fact that kids these days don't want to learn anything.  But it felt a little twisted to feel excited about his upset!

This weekend was full of good things, too.   I should focus on those.  The kids did great during the rather elaborate religious service on Saturday.   In fact, six-year-old was repeating all of the words of the fellow leading the service after him.  Someone (a publicschooling grandpa) asked me, "How'd you get those kids to behave?  Threaten them within an inch of their lives?"   

On Sunday at our Unitarian Universalist church, I went into the nursery to eat donuts and sip coffee with my older (19yo) stepson, hoping to get a chance to talk to him about his engagement announcement privately.   Six-year-old stayed in the sanctuary with the rest of the congregation, feasting out there.   When I came back to find him, I bumped into a conservative, ordinary sort of woman who holds a leadership position within the church.   She was nearly in tears. She told me she had a wonderful ten minute conversation with my six-year-old that uplifted her and filled her soul with warmth, hugged me and told me I was doing a great job as a mom raising wonderful kids!  I was flabbergasted.

Sunday evening we went to a folk music concert at Hamilton College, part of their war resistance teach-in.  Six-year-old wanted to sit in the front row so we were five feet away from Peggy Seeger!   (Pete Seeger's half sister and amazing folk musician in her own right)  He requested a song about union politics.   Peggy couldn't remember the lyrics and asked us if we knew them.   Afterwords she commented on how smart it was for him to understand that song.  We actually studied it during a mini unit on labor activism last year.   Her songs are smart and catchy and a great way to introduce current events.  It was a special homeschooling joy to be able to take the kids onto campus on a Sunday night for an event like that.   Peggy asked, "you have four kids?  How do you look so young?"  and I thought of how different it was for her in the fifties with detachment, institutional theories of parenting prevailing and how lucky I am to be living in an era when women and men who bring their kids into the real world to work at their sides aren't shunned quite so harshly. 

Also this weekend I worried a lot about Brett's (dh's) Tourette Syndrome and how that would affect our attempts at socializing in these new areas.   But we know we've hit a patch of really wonderful people when they notice both his twitching and his careful kind attentiveness with people's feelings and decide that he's alright despite the jerks and twitches.  I nearly fell over with pride watching him participate in the Peggy Seeger concert.  It's not every man that can listen to feminist folk music and laugh at his own gender's ridicule.  He pushed the stroller up and down the hall when the little ones got ornery, too.

I should really end this entry!

How do you decide who gets to keep which books?   Today Sterling asked me about Tale of Despereaux, our shared literature selection for our fantasy genre unit.  Then he wanted to know if The Giver was a library book, and who would get to keep The Story of the World, Volume I.   Verdi immediately laid claim to The Birchbark House.  But I told Bear he could have it.

The homeschool law here in NY requires us to report grades to the local superintendent of schools four times a year.  

I don't keep daily grades or grade assignments.   Like, I imagine, almost all homeschoolers, I have my kids study until they understand the concept or skill.  The end result is always mastery.  

At report time I always have to scramble for numbers or official sounding words to evaluate the kids.  Truthfully, with any given lesson, there's four possible outcomes:  knew it already/skipped, bad attitude/incomplete assignment, immaturity/return to it later, and studied until mastered.  I don't think that the superintendent would understand, though, if I gave Sterling a 10% skipped, a %15 bad attitude, a 5% immature/return later, and a 70% studied until mastered as his American history grade.

Yesterday, I asked Sterling about his preferences for grading mechanisms.  I suggested that he could write a paragraph on what he learned in each subject.  He shuddered.  He is certain that he wants a test.  This is a classic example of more work for me equals less work for him.   I could make him do it anyway.  But I guess I will write a test.  Ten questions in each subject should make it easy to grade, right?  

P.S.;  The baby is at that stage in development where he brings me some random object and then cries because I didn't do with it what he wanted me to do.  Shoes, a piece of paper, the spatula from the kitchen drawer, get banged against my knees.  I tell him what they are, pretend to use them, do something silly.  But it's not what he imagined I'd do, and he can't tell me what he wants, so he disintegrates quickly.  This morning the kids are putting together a wooden puzzle map of the U.S.A.  The baby keeps bringing me states.   Lucky for us, he thinks just hearing their names is hilarious.  "Missouri" gave him belly laughs.

I always finish my food long before the children have finished picking through their red beans for the few kernels of rice that taste "plain."  Instead of fussing over how much they eat, like I used to, I have been using the time to talk to them about religion.  We read a little and discuss major ideas.   Tonight, I began to see this pay off.   They're beginning to see my religion as their religion, and use the vocabulary of this path for themselves.

Six-year-old Verdi's math flashcards are color-coded according to what memory trick he's supposed to use with that fact.   Today, during the part of math drill where he has to shuffle the cards, Verdi began to chatter excitedly.   "Mama, did Native Americans live at the same time as the Celts and Romans?"

"Yes, some Native Americans."

"Well I'm putting all of my red facts alone, and the green facts next to the blue ones.  The blue ones are the Celts.  They're fighting the Romans who are the green ones.  The ones are the Native Americans and they're on another continent."

"Who are the yellow?"

"Um . . . "

"The Vikings!" his older stepbrother interjected.

There comes a time in every homeschooling mothers career when she realizes she is in over her head.  She has to decide whether to turn over the teacher's manual to the child and let him go at it, study one step ahead, or find someone else to teach.

It is 12:30 am.  I took caffeine for a headache and decided to look over the new Latin books.   I don't know if it's the caffeine or the declensions and subject pronouns; I feel like I can't breathe.   Goodness gracious!   I'm supposed to teach this?! 

I need the name of a good Latin support group fast.  I have about ten million questions.

Yesterday we took another day off to bring the children to do holiday stuff.  

Before we left, the mailman showed up with a HUGE box.  My mother had sent us all kinds of Halloween goodies.  The baby fell in love with this mechanical dancing ghost doll that sings "I want candy."    The older kids got Pez dispensers and glow sticks and a huge selection of Halloween themed candy.  Mom also sent a mug shaped like a witch's belly and feet that says, "Witch's Brew," on the side.  I might use that year-round. 

We stopped at Party City to pick up the baby's costume.  He's going to be a monkey.  We picked that because of his love for bananas.  Not just the food - banana songs.  No matter how cranky he is, he perks up to hear the Harry Belafonte song that starts, "day-oh, me say day-ay-ay-oh . . . "  He also loves to dance to the Tally Hall song, Banana Man.  And then there's the bananas in pajamas song.  When the baby tries to sing, he says, "bababababananananananana."   The monkey costume at Party City has a split banana upside down on the top of the hood with ears.   It's horribly adorable.

Then we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a dinner to eat in the corn maze: local brewed root beer, apple doughnuts and other rare goodies.  While Brett drove, I read the story of Theseus and  the Minotaur.  It was the condensed version, more a replay of the facts than a developed story.   But it was the only version I could grab at the last minute when I thought of it. 

By the time we arrived at this little farm, it was dusk.  We drove into a big mud puddle and parked, soaked our pants and shoes getting to the hayride.  Bear slipped one of his mittens between the slats of the wagon and shrieked in grief as it disappeared behind us. 

By now it was so dark that we put glow sticks on the children so we would know where they were.  We watched little lines of neon bob in front of us, slipping and sliding in the mud.  We used the terribly scientific method of "your turn to pick!"  when we came to every crossroads.  Somehow this worked, and we only hit one dead end.   We came out cold and hungry and very, very muddy.  

There was a bonfire next to a picnic table at the exit.  We sat down and pigged out.   It was really a horrible non-nutritious dinner.  But those are pretty rare for us.  And this holiday is pretty big for us.  I'm glad we can take the time to make it special.  I'm especially glad for a partner that shares the same values. 

There's a festival on Sunday with another corn maze.  I think I might give the kids a compass for it.  What a great lesson in directions, right?

I chickened out on my idea of having Sterling backtrack through world history.  It is so much easier to follow the American Story TM for which I paid through the teeth.  I might have assigned it anyway, but he has so much other reading to do right now.  I don't know.  We'll see tomorrow.

As for being behind, we're now back to where we are supposed to be in our yearly schedule.  I can cram one week into one day if I cut out the non-essentials.  Verdi, who really thrives on those non-essentials, is content to do them all day for fun. 

So while Sterling caught up on his penmanship, math and history readings, Verdi made an elaborate paper model of Roanoke with a scroll telling Roanoke's story.   Bear tried to draw his own story in the blank part of the scroll.  In retrospect, I probably should have given Bear black squares numbered just like that and had him doodle in his own story.  Another idea for tomorrow.

It was the very first day of Bear's expanded homeschool program!  He loved it.  We  sang the alphabet song, pointing to a chart the whole time.   We then played "Muffin Match" from Happy Phonics.  Basically it's matching the capitals to the lowercase.  He did better with the matching, only mixing up the Q and the G.  He did pretty miserably with the ABC song.  It was hard for him to remember the tune AND which letter was which.   He also had a hard time counting out five, six and seven objects when I did some math work with him.  He surprised me, though, by using two of the double-sized manipulatives to represent four, instead of four of the single-sized ones.

Sometimes Bear seem brilliant, absolutely genius.  Other times I wonder if something is wrong with him.  He is so thoroughly different from every one else.   He never draws the same conclusions from any given scenario that another person would.  He's always three steps ahead in his thinking, and he picks up all of the subtle clues.  Told to find his socks and get them on, he'll say, "Can I pick out the cereal?" because he already is ahead of me, predicting that shoes come next, then jacket, then a drive, and he overheard me murmur to myself this morning that we need groceries.  Normally, I'll be responding, "No, we're about to leave, you can't have cereal now," and thinking that he's got weird requests at odd time with weird phrasing.  It takes me too long to figure out what he has figured out.

My mind is always in the past.  Right now I'm reading three different books on the ancient Celts.   I yearn to share this with the kids, SO much, that I've been writing letters to them wherein I regurgitate in kid-friendly vocabulary every thing I am learning. 

I love American history, too, but it can't be appreciated without a sturdy understanding of medieval history.  How can you understand medieval history without Roman history?   How can you understand Rome unless you have a grasp of the Celts, the Greeks, the Norse and the Hebrews?  

I am so impatient with American history that I've been dreaming about ancient history all day long -- and now at night, too! 

Last night I dreamt that we were studying the Greenleaf Guide to Famous Men of Greece, and we all went to the Parthenon in Nashville to wrap it up.  

Went to (UU) church with Ami this morning where the kids had a Montessori style religion lesson.  Came home and had garlic bread with dense tomato sauce for lunch, part of our new semi-vegan diet (no meat, no dairy, but eggs and honey okay). 

Then we got crafty.  First, I cut appropriate pumpkin shapes out of orange construction paper, triangles and background scenes out of black, white ghosts and tombstones, yellow triangles and grins, brown stems and green leaves.  Then I gave the kids gluesticks so they could put them together to make jack-o-lanterns and graveyard scenes.   With all the crazy shapes we had left over, they made some really neat designs.  We also made letters to spell BOO! and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  I gave Bear black letter outlines and had him glue yellow shapes onto the black to make letters.  We then taped these all over our walls for decoration. 

The kids played at Ben and Jerry's Halloween website for awhile after. 

He now can spell his name, our friend Ami's name, and the word "boo."  He writes them all over everything, proudly.  He keeps asking me how to spell the cat's name, too, so I suspect he'll have that down soon.   I will start a phonics program with him tomorrow morning (Happy Phonics from LovetoLearn) but I am also encouraging his whole language approach to teaching himself.  It takes both, I'm sure.

Reading political blogs and editorials and watching political YouTubes first thing in the AM makes me feel sick deep down inside.  (Please don't let the liberal sources of these things distract you; habeus corpus is not a liberal or a conservative thing.)  I can't really teach the kids about what this means without going all the way back to the middle ages.  I'm switching gears.  I'm going to have Sterling read through A Child's History of the World and then feed him James Daugherty's Magna Charta and Uncle Eric's Whatever Happened to Justice.  We'll then go back into our study of colonial times with an understand of how the world stage was set for this amazing idea.

We are getting further behind.   Sterling is so sick that he doesn't even want to play video games, doesn't even want to read, and even turned down a rare opportunity to go to McDonalds yesterday.  No school is feasible, not even history readings. 

Verdi, however, has done two pages of Printing Power (Handwriting Without Tears) today, played Addit (Math-It), drawn a lesson from The Drawing Textbook (a jack-in-the-box), read pages 3-15 of The New Americans, and is now taping together a paper model of Jamestown.

After looking at Prima Latina and Matin Latin, I put in an order for the Matin.  I wanted something easy to teach, since I've never studied Latin, but wasn't comfortable with Memoria Press' prayers.  When I read that Matin Latin includes mythology, I was sold.  I did spend a bit of time reading around the Memoria Press website, creating in my self an even stronger anxious desire for Verdi to get into classical history ASAP.   Not that I think every one needs to know who Socrates was to live a good life, but I do believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, and who better than the Greek philosophers to convince my sons of that?  Years away, I know, he's only six, stop dreaming and get on with the math facts . . .

I haven't integrated recorder into our daily lessons yet.  The problem is the baby.  When he's asleep, the recorder wakes him up.  When he's awake, we can't make out the sounds of the recorder over his crying to play it. 

I am posting this instead of defrosting my freezer.  Ugh.  Better get on to it.

Like the famous hare, we were ahead, we relaxed, and now we're behind.   Being 75% unschooler, I can't help but ask myself, "behind what?"  Unfortunately, the answer is, "behind what I told the school district I'd accomplish by Week 8."   In NY, we have to report every quarter with a written explanation in the event that 80% or less of the planned material is covered. 

We are moving out of a spectactularly lousy Explorers unit and into a so-far better Early Settlements unit.  I kind of wish the kids had a better grasp of the story of the Spanish conquering of the middle Americans, but it's not like math facts or how to punctuate a sentence or something.  I'll probably feed Verdi a really fascinating book on it later, and let Sterling rediscover it in high school.  So far, Sterling and Verdi both show an interest in Roanoke and Pocahontas, typically, I suppose.  Verdi was also fascinated by the architecture of Jamestown.  We made a 3-D Village today that Verdi loved cutting out and pasting together.  I did the coloring for him.  It was a good compromise; it allowed him to enjoy it and busied our hands while we discussed what we each knew about it.   Independent reading + joint project = excellent discussion.

Bear seems to have completely lost interest in schoolish materials.  He's silly all of the time, instead.  I feel bad about it only because I think it's because I neglected to spend any of my time or attention on him.  If that weren't the cause, I'd be thrilled that he had moved back into real life, hands-on learning.   He is still learning.  Today he was sitting at Verdi's desk and pointing out which letters on the handwriting chart are used to spell his name, my name, and our friend Ami's name.  He also wanted to know about when to use grown-up letters and when to use baby letters.

Verdi is zipping through Addit, his math facts drill game.  I told him to keep on doing it, doubtful that it would help if he was checking the answers-on-back for each one, but it worked anyway.  He now knows all of his twin cards (10+10, 9+9, 8+8, etc) by heart.  I think I'll move him into the next drill game at the end of this quarter. 

The baby is walking now.  A few days ago he took a crayon and made marks with it on paper (at Ruby Tuesdays, with Ami tutoring).  This morning he put a peg man into his hole seat on a rocking wooden boat.  Oh and he's repeating our words like crazy.  Poor Ami was trying to teach him to say "Ami" but making the "AY! AY!" sound.  But the baby pronounced it "AH! AH!"  He did pick up Ami's enthusiasm though. So now whenever the baby sees Ami, he yells, "AAAAAH! AAAAH!" and it sounds for all the world like he's terrified.

Even though we have given up on nature study as our official science program for this year, we still have to do nature study because it is part of living on Earth. 

Part of the religious education program I am studying right now is connecting with nature in a daily way.  The program asked me to pick a spot to observe regularly. Since I live in a city apartment, in a dangerous neighborhood, my choices were limited.  Limited to one spot.  It's about 20x 30 inches, directly to the right of my front stoop, and occasionally has a bag of garbage on it.  But things grow there, bugs are often there, the dog has been known to use the space when I can't take her for a walk and she really has to go.  Oh, ick.  I procrastinated for a long time on this part of my religious education program until I finally realized that it was this spot or none and never.

Today I went out there and communed with it.  Or watched it, pathetically, anyway.  And cleaned it of trash and poop.  It was then that I realized there is a plant growing on it.  It's centered, as though someone may have planted it.  It's also flattened, as though someone has been putting a full bag of trash on it every Tuesday night for several years. 

I do not know what this plant might be.   I mentioned this to Sterling, who said, "Wouldn't it be neat if field guides were like Pokedex on the cartoon?  Point it at the plant and it lists off it's name and characteristics for you."  I agreed wholeheartedly!  There is actually nothing else I like about Pokemon. 

Some options I am considering are: asking a local college student for help, asking the old hippies at the natue preserve for help, and searching for a better field guide. 

  Instead of having the two big boys work together on as many subjects as possible, I let them move ahead at their own pace, and work in two different rooms.

I was afraid it wouldn't be as interesting to them if they weren't doing it together.  Sterling is an auditory learner and has to discuss, discuss, discuss, too.   They may have missed that a bit, but they appreciated that I wasn't rushing one or letting one skip work to get to the same place in the schedule. 

The best part of all was that Verdi was much less distracted.  He had his best day so far, today, and I'm sure the separate workstations was the reason.